FatDog has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a file where each row is 1 record with about 65 columns of information. I need to test some of these columns for specific ranges of values. So I naturally want to use split like this: 
 my (@Cols) = split (",", $lRow);

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Here is the problem: many of the rows have free-text comment blocks with commas that are delimited by double-quotes like this: 
1123,,,"10.11.12.13",4,"I really, really wanted",,,"It was, like great
+"
1123,,,"34.123.12.12",8,"Fantastic",,,"",,

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How do I remove all commas if they are between ," and ", bracketing pairs?

Note: I dont have to preserve the free-text comments. Is there a regrex to detect & replace everything between: ," and ", if there is a comma with ,"",? The problem is: things like IP addresses and email address are also enclosed in " characters and I need to preserve them. Another problem, some people put multiple comma's in their comments like: "It was ,,,,, the worst experience of my life"

Note: I can make multiple passes through the row so I have thought about replacing all ," combinations with ,| combinations and all ", combinations with |, then replacing everything between two || chars with "".

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Need help parsing comma-delimited file
by jZed (Prior) on May 20, 2004 at 23:30 UTC
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Re: Need help parsing comma-delimited file
by pizza_milkshake (Monk) on May 20, 2004 at 22:40 UTC 
    perl -MCPAN -e'install Text::CSV'

...

#!perl -wl

use strict;
use Text::CSV;

my $csv = new Text::CSV;

while (<DATA>) {
        next unless $csv->parse($_);
        print join(":", $csv->fields());
}

__DATA__
"1","2",3
"a,b",c,d

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    perl -e"\$_=qq/nwdd\x7F^n\x7Flm{{llql0}qs\x14/;s/./chr(ord$&^30)/ge;print"

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[d/l]
      Cool. I will install Text::CSV and give it a shot. Thanks!
[reply]
Re: Need help parsing comma-delimited file
by Nkuvu (Priest) on May 20, 2004 at 22:06 UTC
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